Summary Triumph of the Crackpots in American Politics (w/ Brian Klaas) | Bulwark Podcast (Youtube) www.youtube.com
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Brian Klaas This is what journalism exists for. The reason it exists is to inform the public when there are high stakes elections, and this is the highest stakes elections that's existed in my lifetime and arguably in modern American history. And I, you know, I think when you have a pro democracy party going up an anti against an anti democracy party, it's an existential risk to democracy.
Charlie Sykes Welcome to the Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We are almost all the way through January, and we have a lot of ground to cover today. We're we're joined, once again, by Brian Klaas), professor of global politics at the University College London, where he focuses on democracy, authoritarianism, And American politics and foreign policy. So welcome back, Brian.
Charlie Sykes Welcome from England.
Brian Klaas Thanks for having me on the show.
Charlie Sykes And, hey, I wanna talk about your new mind bending book, Fluke, Chance, chaos, and why everything we do matters, which which I found a little bit alarming and scary, but you you claim it’s uplifting. I just we're gonna get to that In a moment. Also, I wanna talk to you about the banality of crazy. But I blame you for this because, you you called attention to an amazing exchange, that took place on a local CBS affiliate television station down in Miami. And and just to set the scene for this, There is a congresswoman from, you know, South Florida named, Maria Salazar, who, on her Twitter biography, described herself as a 5 time Emmy Award winning journalist.
Charlie Sykes I'm not sure what that's all about. Okay. So she's sitting down with kind of, 1 of the local legends of of journalism. A guy named, Jim DeFede. And he and she's bragging about all the money That she's brought into South Florida.
Charlie Sykes She's bragging specifically about, I got you $40,000,000. And what what I think is interesting is listen how the reporter here, Jim DeFede, does not let this go, pointing out that, wait. You voted against the bills that provided that money. You voted against the infrastructure, bill. You voted against the It’s Act, And it goes back and forth, but in in some ways, I think and I think you highlighted this, Brian.
Charlie Sykes This is the kind of Hold your feet to the fire journalism. We just don't see every day, and it is a thing of It is a thing of beauty. So let's just play this. This is again, CBS local CBS reporter named Jim DeFede questioning Republican congresswoman Maria Salazar.
Jim DeFede Last month, you were at FIU, and you presented a check for 650,000 to help small businesses at FIU. But you voted against the bill that gave the money that you then signed a check for and handed and had a photo op. The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2023. Right? You voted against that bill.
Maria Salazar I I right now, you have to give me more details, but I do know that every time I have an opportunity to bring money to my constituents, I do so. I just never remember? I just said $400,000. But look.
Jim DeFede Well, you but you voted against you voted against the It’s and Science Act. Right?
Maria Salazar Listen. I right now, I need to I need to ask my staff. But, you know, what do you mean? $40,000,000 that I have brought to this community. So Aren't you proud of me?
Maria Salazar I ain't you proud of the $40,000,000 that much? But how much Are you proud that I wrote the Dignity Act? Haven't I? I mean, let's talk about the Wait.
Jim DeFede Wait. Wait a sec. Let me 1 second.
Maria Salazar Tell me.
Jim DeFede The money that you talk about, the $40,000,000 that you bring back to the district, sometimes that money comes from bills that you voted against. You voted against the It’s Act, and yet you praise the fact that the South Florida Climate Resilience This tech hub is gonna be started in Miami. Right? You voted against the infrastructure bill, and you talk about all the money that comes back to the Airport. So at the same time that you're taking credit for the money that you bring back to the district, in Washington, you're voting against these projects on party line votes.
Maria Salazar Listen. I that was, I think, last cycle. I cannot really remember right now, but
Charlie Sykes just look
Maria Salazar it’s look at the American act, which is what I'm I'm gonna vote just what I'm gonna like.
Jim DeFede You don't wanna explain why you voted against this.
Maria Salazar I mean, right now and I'm not trying to be a politician. There's so many bills that I've introduced that I know that many of them
Jim DeFede But you voted against the
Maria Salazar That I understand. And but then it's okay. Sometimes I vote it’s sometimes I don't, but let's look at the positive. Let's look at the $40,000,000 that are brought.
Charlie Sykes Okay. Wow, Brian. Okay. What what what's what's struck you about that?
Brian Klaas Well, you know, I think there's a few things. 1 is how rare that is in American media, which I think is a really depressing aspect of this because it's just so basic. I mean, he's not doing anything, you know, groundbreaking as a journalist. He's just insisting on the facts, And he's not moving on, which I think is really important. It's, by the way, a very strong feature of British journalism and, like I
Jim DeFede know.
Brian Klaas The way that press interviews here, unfold here are Extremely, confrontational and adversarial. And I
Charlie Sykes don't And they make the follow-up culture. Right. Yes.
Brian Klaas Of follow ups and sort of fact checking in real time and so on. What was amazing, though, about that clip is at the end at the end, she still says, but you don't you're not talking about the positives of what I brought here. And so even at the end of it, it’s she's claiming credit. So she's responsible for it’s, whereas if everybody was like her in congress, the money wouldn't have been appropriated. So it's just, I mean, the brazen shamelessness of it is just us.
Brian Klaas Okay.
Charlie Sykes That that was the word that I was looking for. So just the the pure shamelessness. She's confronted with it and just does not even blink. Just keeps going with the same talking point even though it's been blown up. And and, of course, that that, you know, really cringeworthy awkwardness where She just can't remember how she voted on 2 of the biggest pieces of legislation in front of congress because there are just so many bills.
Charlie Sykes You know, Brian? I'm just gonna have to check with my staff because I forget that I voted against this bill that I'm on your show touting. I just it's Kind of a Klaas) 1.
Brian Klaas I mean, that's the thing. It's like, she she should not be in congress if she can't know how she voted on, like, 2 of the most important flagship pieces of legislation in that congressional cycle. I mean, it's like everything about that interview is just like the indication of how unfit for office some of these people are And how, as I said, brazen they are about claiming credit for things that they tried to kill. I mean, it's like it's just amazing. And, of course, the democrats are all to blame when, you know, they have the talking points.
Brian Klaas Oh, it's this big government stuff, but they're very happy to cut the ribbon ribbon or sign the check. I mean, it's just amazing. It's just really depressing. I would like
Charlie Sykes to think she's also an outlier or an isolated case, but I don't think that that's the case. I think a lot of these congress, people walk onto the floor, and they're Told how to vote by somebody, by leadership, or by their staff. Vote yes or no. And they have no idea what's in the bill, and probably the next day couldn't tell you how they voted on it. So, I want before we get into your your your new book, your very provocative new book, I I wanna talk about, something you wrote a Couple of months ago that you described as the banality of crazy.
Charlie Sykes You wrote this back in October on Substack that That Americans, they only a few Americans just recognize just how deranged, delusional, and dangerous Trump is Because the press has gotten kind of bored with the routine insanity. So talk to me about this, about the banality of The banality of crazy sort of, obviously, somewhat inspired by Hannah Arendt's, the banality of evil. But there is a problem. When Donald Trump says Something crazy, 86 times a a day, it becomes kind of difficult to focus in on it.
Maria Salazar Yeah. So this was this was
Brian Klaas boiling inside of me for a long time, but there was a trigger for it as well. So the the the the boiling cut came from the fact that In the UK where I live, when Trump tweeted anything in 2017, my phone would blow up with people wanting to ask me about it in the British news. Right? And it just stopped. Right?
Brian Klaas It's like it just completely dried up. Like, the stuff that he says does not make international news, and a lot of it does not make the press in the United States even because there's just such a flow of it. And the trigger for the piece was when I saw him call to execute Mark Milley and or floated the idea of the possibility of executing Mark Milley, America's top general at the time. And I looked at The New York Times, no headline. I looked at The Washington Post, no headline.
Brian Klaas Looked at The Wall Street Journal, no headline. The Wall Street Journal or sorry. The the New York Times did cover that story 3 days after Trump said it on page 14. And I'm thinking to myself, okay. When else in American history as a president said that we should literally execute the top general, and it's not generated any press?
Brian Klaas I mean, let alone ever even said it. Right? And then the the the same, time around that same time, he called to execute shoplifters. Right? He said that we should shoot shoplifters on-site.
Brian Klaas And, you know, I'm not on the side of shoplifters, but, like, this is an extreme set Big story. Of of, you know, punitive you know, like, just extrajudicial killings for people who steal, like, a TV, right, or even, like, you know, a bar of soap. And I looked at that, and I was like, okay. I wanna look at some some data on this. And so I looked at Google News, it’s, how many times something was covered in the news.
Brian Klaas And I looked at the shoplifters thing, and then I compared it to how many stories were about, Hunter or not Hunter Biden, about commander Biden, Joe Biden's dog biting a secret service agent. And there were more stories about the dog than there were about the Leading presidential contender in the country. Right? He was leading the polls, saying that we should execute shoplifters and kill America's top general. And you're just think I'm just thinking to myself, How is this possible?
Brian Klaas So the dynamic I'm describing is that the fire hose of insane things that Trump says on a regular basis is so overwhelming That the way the press deals with it is by focusing on novelty rather than magnitude. So, like, John Fetterman's hoodie is a new story. It's an interesting story. It's totally unimportant. Right?
Brian Klaas Whereas Trump going up in front of a bunch of people in a baying crowd and calling to execute various enemies or saying racist stuff Just doesn't register anymore. But, like, you know, if you if you made a list of the 10 craziest things that a president has said in the last 50 years, all of them would be Trump, And a lot of them would be replaced by Trump in the next 3 months, right, because he's getting crazier over time. But the press just doesn't have the capacity to chase stories endlessly when they are not new, but they are important. And I think that's the thing that Trump has exposed in the in the way that the journalism in the United States works is it's It's all fixated on novelty and not fixated on magnitude.
Charlie Sykes Yeah. And in in that in that way, he's kind of broken the model of of journalism. Now you wrote at the time, Bombarded by a constant stream of deranged authoritarian extremism from a man who might soon return to the presidency, we've lost all sense of scale and perspective. But neither the American press nor the public can afford to be lulled. The man who is president incited a violent attack on the US Capitol in order to overturn is again openly fomenting political violence while explicitly endorsing authoritarian strategies should he return to power.
Charlie Sykes That is the story of the 2024 election. Everything else is just window dressing. So, you know, it’s you know, since then, there have been so many illustrations of what you're describing. He will come out with, You know, not just 1 or 2, but, you know, 3 or 4 utterly deranged tweets, dangerous tweets, hold my beer. This is what I'm going to do If I am restored to power, tweet.
Charlie Sykes And they are shrugged off. We have become normed, numbed. I very rarely watch the evening news. I was watching Klaas) night, 1 of the major networks talking about the border thing. And, honestly, watching that, you would think that Donald Trump is a completely normal candidate in a completely normal political year.
Charlie Sykes And so what's what's the answer? How do you fix that? Because news it’s, by definition, addicted to novelty. And after 8 years, how can we continue to cover it as if we're still shocked by it?
Brian Klaas Yeah. So I think there's a a few things there. I mean, 1, just to do with a thought experiment here. Yeah. Do you think that if Joe Biden said that we should kill the chairman of the joint chiefs of Staff, that would be the front page story in the New York Times.
Brian Klaas I mean, I definitely
Charlie Sykes think that would happen. Right? I've I've I've put the money down on that. Yeah. Mhmm.
Maria Salazar Yeah. So, you know, I think this
Brian Klaas this the standard the press has to have is that it should Cover statements from people who may be president or are president the same way regardless of who's saying them. That's the first thing. Right? The second thing that I think is important, you don't bake in the crazy and then discount it. I think that's what basically happened with Trump is it’s, like, baked in.
Brian Klaas Like, oh, yeah. He's crazy and authoritarian. It's like, let's not cover it. Yeah. I I think the second thing that's important is that the press has an obligation to not chase clicks in this election and to instead focus on what's important.
Brian Klaas And I think, you know, if there's ever a time to do this, I understand that journalism is just getting obliterated by, you know, layoffs and and cost pressures and so on. But, like, this is what journalism exists for. The reason it exists is to inform the public when there are high stakes elections, and this is the highest stakes election it’s existed in my lifetime and arguably in modern American history. And I, you know, I think when you have a pro democracy party going up an anti against an anti democracy party, It's an existential risk to democracy. Right?
Brian Klaas This this wasn't the case in the past. Like, if Mitt Romney won in 2012, it would have been fine. There would have been no problem. You know, people would have partisan disagreements, but, like, he wouldn't have torpedoed the system. And once the system goes away, you know, everything's lost.
Brian Klaas So I this is where I just hope, you know, I hope there are conversations in newsrooms that are like, why are we doing this? Like, what what is our job for? And the answer is to, you know, to to to inform people about the stakes, not about the horse race. And so much coverage is just about horse race novelty. And it makes the country stupider, and it also makes the country poorly informed when they're heading into a really, really consequential election.
Charlie Sykes Well, I agree with you completely, but let's Just just step back for a moment. I mean, even here, you know, on in in the Bulwark, which is a, I think, you know, pretty clearly anti Trump site, we will get comments from people saying, you know, why do you spend so much time talking about Trump? Why don't we just ignore him? Why don't we just not give him, you know, the the option? If we didn't cover him, it wouldn't be so dangerous.
Charlie Sykes So there is kind of and I you know, some of this I think is political, but some of it is just the psychological grind Of numbness, which is that people cannot take it. They cannot take psychologically, you can't be told, You know, the sky is falling. The sun is going to, you know, obliterate you every single day 247 before you shut down. So there's a psychological component, which then goes back to these conversations in the newsroom in a, you know, in a news media that is, shall we say, you know, going through some challenging times. And they go, okay.
Charlie Sykes You know, we could do this, but you you we're gonna burn people out. Secondly, we're gonna burn our staff out. We're gonna we're gonna burn out the the audience, You know? And it's just gonna accelerate the the, you know, the bubbleization of the media. You know?
Charlie Sykes Pro Trump people are just gonna turn us off. They're gonna say they're biased. I mean, It does seem like an almost a insoluble Rubik's cube unless you really reimagine journalism, Which I think is what you're talking about.
Brian Klaas Yeah. I mean, I think that there's, you know, there's a few things, that that I would say there. The first is that I'm completely sympathetic to this point of view. I mean, I don't wanna know how many of my brain cells are devoted to all the crazy stuff that Donald Trump has said. You know, I have like, I wrote a book about him at 1 point.
Brian Klaas I have a Very detailed knowledge of Donald Trump's public statements and behavior, and I wish I didn't. Right? Like, I would love to reclaim those brain cells. And I hate writing about them. I hate talking about them, but it's important.
Brian Klaas Right? And I think this is the kind of stuff where a lot of people who do produce the news and who do punditry and so on feel exactly the same way I do. They think I would love to wake up and never think about Donald Trump American, but the country has to because he might be in power.
Charlie Sykes Right.
Brian Klaas So you know? And he might Affect the fate of the democratic system for a generation, so we we've gotta deal with this. I I think the aspects around, you know, how you cover him. What I would say is that The problem is the optimization has already happened. Right?
Brian Klaas And this is what I worry about is that if you turn on, like, the normal nightly news, as you say, He looks like a normal guy. Oh, he maybe he's gone to court because he's been sued, but they don't, like, show his crazy statements in front of the rallies anymore. Whereas his base is getting the crazy piped into their you know, injected straight into their veins, and they're radicalizing. And this is what I the dynamic that I was trying to highlight is that, like, look. All the people who already they already believe in Trumpism.
Brian Klaas They're getting this information, and they're becoming more dangerous. They're becoming more authoritarian, more more potentially violent. The rest of the people who are sort of apathetic mainstream voters are forgetting how crazy he was. And so that dynamic was a really big recipe, and I think that's where Polls were showing that he was surging because there's this amnesia where it's like, yeah, it wasn't so bad. Right?
Brian Klaas And I think that's the issue that I that I think needs to be direct
Charlie Sykes directly addressed. No. And then this then that's that's massively important. Okay. So I wanna talk about your book, because it it feels like at least temporarily a a step Back from the horse race, the the the daily flow of all this, fluke, chance, chaos, and why everything we do matters.
Charlie Sykes Now you you you talk about chaos Theory and and what chaos theory teaches us about human events and that in the 21st century, we live in a time defined by, You know, 1 unexpected shock after another, these black swan style events. So first of all, talk to me about chaos theory and then about these black swan events and why we are so Vulnerable right now at this point in history.
Brian Klaas Okay. So the way that I describe chaos theory, the formal definition is basically it's called sensitivity on initial conditions, which is a Academic way of saying that small changes can have really big effects over time. And the way I illustrate this in the opening story of the book It it’s with a a vacation that a couple takes in 1926 Japan to Kyoto. An American couple goes to Kyoto, Japan, falls in love with the it’s, and developed a soft spot for it. Now this shouldn't matter that much in the grand scheme of history, but it does.
Brian Klaas Because 19 years later, the husband is Henry Stimpson, And he's America's secretary of war, and the target committee, which decides where to drop the first atomic bomb, picks Kyoto. And so Stimpson twice meets with president Truman, gets Kyoto taken off the targeting list because he liked the city when he vacationed there with his wife, And the first atomic bomb goes to Hiroshima instead. Right? And the second atomic bomb is supposed to go to Kokura, another city, But there's briefly cloud cover over the city, and so a 100000 people get incinerated in Nagasaki instead, the secondary target that day. Now Wow.
Brian Klaas The idea that, you know, a vacation 19 years earlier can cause this massive shift in who lives and who dies In World War 2 it’s the way that world actually works as part of chaos theory, and it's it's how cause and effect actually operates. What we have done is we've ignored that a lot in how we understand the world, and It’s I think it's created this hubris, which leads into the second part of your question about the black swans, where I think we have engineered a world that is extremely prone to Klaas), and and prone to being shocked because of chaotic events. So the way I describe this is you imagine that you have, a sort of sand pile. Right? So you add a grain of sand 1 after another onto this pile.
Brian Klaas Eventually, the sand pile gets so tall that a single grain of sand can cause an avalanche and the whole thing can collapse. What modern society does, it builds the sand pile to the absolute limit. And this is where, you know, you have The Arab Spring, for example, getting triggered by a guy letting himself in fire in Tunisia in late 2010, and it causes a civil war and the collapse of multiple regimes. Or you have, you know, in 2021, the Suez Canal where there's a boat that gets twisted sideways and it wipes out $54,000,000,000 in economic, productivity because the just in time manufacturing that we run on has no slack. Right?
Brian Klaas So my basically, what I'm arguing is that Chaos theory always changes the way that our lives and our societies unfold. We almost never think about it. But today, it's particularly important because we've embedded Systemic risk in our societies by thinking that we can control an uncontrollable world and therefore making it so The sand pile in that analogy is as absolutely high as it can be. 1 grain of sand falls in the wrong place and the cascade wipes us out, and that was the pandemic or the US Canal or whatever it
Charlie Sykes Or or, you know, some individual in Wuhan, China, who had COVID 19, you know, coughs in the wrong place where it gets out of a lab. Or as you point out, You know, Obama humiliating Donald Trump at the White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011, which may have prompted him to decide to run. We know where where all of that is is at. So the significance of this, though, you as as as you point out, though, is that we want to believe that the world is a comprehensible place. Right?
Charlie Sykes That there are no coincidences, that there are narratives that tie all this together. So, again, these are blacks we think of them As black swan events. I mean and and and they are increasing in frequency. It's not just our optimization. Right?
Charlie Sykes That these huge things like what's happening in in the Middle East. But you write, most people like to imagine that we can understand, predict, and control the world. Humans crave a rational explanation To make sense of the chaos of life. You know, this is not supposed to be a world where 100 of 1000 of people just die or because Henry Stimpson, you know, has great sex in Kyoto where, you know, the clouds are in it that that hundreds of thousands of people die. I mean but So, you know, this this this whole idea that we've just amplified all the contingency and which means that we live in a world where really insignificant events are more likely to just blow everything up.
Charlie Sykes So how does that relate to the craziness of our politics? I mean, Alright. K. You said this was uplifting. I'm thinking like, oh, shit.
Charlie Sykes You know? There's a butterfly out there with indigestion who's gonna do something today That's gonna wipe out half the planet, and there's nothing we can do about it. So how does this affect our politics now?
Maria Salazar Yeah. So I think
Brian Klaas I think there are worrying things that are depressing about the political implications in the short term, but they can be uplifting in the long term. I think the uplifting stuff is more for our individual lives, which I like I write a lot about how this affects the way we think about our own lives. But, In the short term, yes. I think we've embedded systemic risk into our societies in a way that's really dangerous. And the the way I describe this is If you think about, like, the the vast stretch of humanity, you know, the 9,500 generations or so of modern humans that have existed, you know, like Like, 91 100 of them were hunter gatherers where basically they had no idea it’s gonna happen in their day to day life.
Brian Klaas Like, they might starve. They might get eaten by an animal or whatever. But, like, their world never changed that much. Right? The kids and the parents lived in the same world generation after generation.
Brian Klaas So they had Exact same amount of years. Instability. Yes. Exactly. So so they had, like, local instability, but global stability is what I describe it as.
Brian Klaas We've completely flipped that world around. So we now have a world in which Our day to day lives are incredibly regular and ordered. Right? Starbucks is always the same, but our democracies are collapsing and our rivers are drying up. And our world is constantly changing, and, of course, AI is going to accelerate that and so on.
Brian Klaas So what I say is that the lesson here is not that we're just screwed. Right? This is the This is what you're taking from this. Okay. Yeah.
Brian Klaas Good. Yeah. This is this is not true. The lesson is we don't have to be screwed, but that's because we have to acknowledge that we don't Have control in the way that we think we do. And if we if we think differently about this, then we'll have a slightly less of a premium put on optimization and efficiency See?
Brian Klaas To the absolute maximum. Right? We we make the sand pile a little bit smaller, and it's resilient. And the resilience point is 1 you know, there's a great example of this in Latin America where the the Power grid was failing all the time, and they had a, a new power grid they're going to set up, electricity grid. And it was more expensive and also less efficient to compartmentalize the power grid with all these regional hubs.
Brian Klaas Right?
Charlie Sykes Mhmm.
Brian Klaas But they did it. And then there was a massive blackout, but it only affected the tiny part of the country, because they had built resilience rather than optimization as an efficiency as their core sort of, driver. And it was overall, it paid for itself because the the potential lost economic damage that they would have had if it had been a national grid Was immediately paid for by the fact that they compartmentalize the damage. So the the lesson here, I think, is 1 that says, look. Yeah.
Brian Klaas Like, if we keep on the same path that we are now, we are screwed, I think. I think that we're going to have catastrophic risk just to find the rest of the 21st century and potentially in worse ways than we have already. I think the question is, you know, can we engineer a system that's more resilient? And I think the answer is yes. But, you know, we have to change our mentality that, like, I mean, I I have a hard time when I talk to people about this because they say, hold on.
Brian Klaas You're gonna tell me that optimization and efficiency are bad? It's like, no. I think that if we had 5% less efficiency and that created 25% more resilience, that would be a good trade. Right? So I that that's what I'm talking about.
Brian Klaas It's sort of this trade off between, you know, systemic risk and, stability and resilience for the long term.
Charlie Sykes Okay. Well, let's just go back though to to the stories that we tell ourselves And and and why this always comes as a shock. As as you point out, forecasters, pundits, policymakers Have developed what you call this dangerous hubris about their ability to control the world. So, you know, despite all of this this chaos and this contingency, You know, the the, you know, the the voices in our heads tell us, no. Everything is orderly.
Charlie Sykes If it's not orderly, it's It's for some, you know, explainable reason. And and you link this, and I this is this is what I thought was quite eye opening, Is you link this to the prevalence of conspiracy thinking. You know, how the brain, you know, wants to detect Patterns. Right? So when when these random events occur, we want a story.
Charlie Sykes We want it to make sense. Right? So the conspiracy theorist Has this massive weapon because they always have a great story. Your point is there's not necessarily a story here. This just happened.
Charlie Sykes Right? But the conspiracy theories and so we you know, as we live through these shocks and these black swan events, Conspiracy theory seem to be spreading. You see a connection, a causal relationship there. Talk to me about that.
Brian Klaas Yeah. So there's there's 2 really important biases that are behind conspiratorial thinking. And 1 of them is called magnitude bias, and the other one's called narrative bias. So magnitude bias is the human belief that big events must have big causes. So the best example of this is, you know, princess Diana dies in a car accident.
Brian Klaas It’s like a random car accident. If you ask people about the origins of why this happened, The conspiratorial thinkers will simultaneously say that they believe that she is alive and that she was killed by the British government. And those are mutually contradictory statements. Right?
Charlie Sykes Yeah.
Brian Klaas But, like, they're more yeah. But they're more satisfying than this idea of a small Accident falling this, what they see it’s a profound event. Right? A very big thing in in in British, history. So that's magnitude bias.
Brian Klaas And a lot of times, small accidents do Cause big effects. I mean, this is something where World War 1 started with an assassination where the guy, you know, accidentally stops his car in front of the assassin and World War 1 it’s triggered by it and so on. So magnitude bias is 1 part of it. The other 1 which you mentioned is the narrative bias aspect, and human brains are pattern detection machines that make sense of the world through stories. And the point that Jonathan Gottschall, who I riff on in the book a lot, he has this book called the storytelling animal, what he talks about is he's like, look.
Brian Klaas What you've got here is you've got a brain that is basically designed to latch on to stories.
Charlie Sykes Right.
Brian Klaas And then the conspiracy theorists give you 1 hell of a good story. Now I think QAnon is, like, totally insane. Right? It's it's it's an insane set of ideas. It would be a thriller if it was just a film and not an actual part of our politics.
Brian Klaas Right? It’s is like this would not be a boring movie. And so the thing is what you have is you have journalists or, like, people like us who say There is no story to the storytelling animal. And on the other side, you've got these people saying, hey. This is 1 hell of a good story.
Brian Klaas You wanna be you wanna be part of this? And and on top of that, you know, why don't you fuse your identity with belief in this, and then you can become part of this really elite club of people who know the real truth and the secret pattern. Right? So, you know, I I think there's stuff like this where we have all these aspects of conspiratorial thinking we try to explain in the modern world. I think some of it is just you know, it's It's storytelling versus explanations that are either small accidents or randomness, and people are allergic to that, when big things happen in their world.
Charlie Sykes Yeah. I mean, it's it's 1 thing to, you know, shrug your say, hey. You know, what was that about? Well, happens, And then somebody else has a much, much more compelling story. This is what, you wrote at 1 point, which I thought was really, really, profound.
Charlie Sykes Conspiracy theories take a bewildering series of seemingly unconnected data it’s, and they put them into a coherent story. It's usually a hell of a good story to complete with cover ups, shadowy cabals, orchestrated by cartoon villains, who are hoping that you, the blindfolded chump, Will not discover the truth, and the debunkers have this impossible task. It's a battle that's already lost. Evolution determined the winner. When forced to choose between a good story or none at all, We grab the popcorn mesmerized by a hidden plot.
Charlie Sykes That is 1 of the best explanations I've heard for the prevalence of conspiracy theories right now Is people want and and also it’s that secret knowledge, right, which is not necessarily a new thing, is that you're led into This is what they don't want you to know. This is the secret knowledge, and the people who are saying happens are trying to bamboozle you. You're the blindfolded chump.
Brian Klaas Well, and this is also where, you know, the the the other factors that we do know correlate with conspiracy theories of boredom and loneliness are things that feed into this. Right? I mean, if you if you're gonna be inducted in the secret society of people who know the real pattern and it's a really good story and your life is a little bit boring or you're just lonely. Yeah. Right?
Brian Klaas That that's the glue that solidifies this aspect of the storytelling. So I think, you know, it's when you think about it that way, it's a it's a bit demystified why people We'll latch onto these things because it's exciting. I mean, you you can press people on it, and they'll say, maybe it's not completely true, but they don't wanna leave the tribe. And they also don't like the idea that, like, you know, this was just something that happened. It’s just sometimes stuff happens.
Brian Klaas So I, you know, I I I think there are other reasons. I'm not trying to say this it’s the Only explanation for the rise of conspiratorial thinking, but it is something that does make a lot of sense, in terms of the way that our brains process information. I think stories are so central to the way humans make decisions and behave. And, you know, we have narratives about our own lives. We have narratives about the economy, and they drive us to act.
Brian Klaas And I think, unfortunately, a lot of people are driven to act by things like QAnon.
Charlie Sykes So you you you say that this is the way we've evolved so that we know the Battle was already, you know, lost in the beginning because this is what evolution has done to us, which implies, okay, it's gonna be very, very hard to fix. And then, of course, we actually have an entertainment complex, which puts us all on steroids because as I was listening to you, I was thinking about What was I watching on television last night? I was watching a very, very elaborate show in which the conspiracy theorists were right. Right? The Cabals were cartoon villains.
Charlie Sykes They really were keeping the secret knowledge from you. And, you know, we have developed a really robust Entertainment industry, where you sit down and you go, anything is possible. There are conspiracies everywhere, and the people that, you know, are often dismissed as nuts Are really the heroes of the movie. And then these people, you know, step out of their basements and go into the real life and they think, hey, I'm looking for the same kind of story. So Putting together evolution and then evolution on steroids from the entertainment as as the entertainment industry that you've described, how are we not totally screwed, Brian?
Maria Salazar Well, I think that I think this is going
Brian Klaas to be hard to counteract. Your your point about the entertainment, by the way, is totally apt because there's loads of studies that look at this with, like, Nielsen ratings, TV ratings, And anything that concludes without, like, a neat and tidy explanation where, like, all of a sudden everything comes into view and makes complete sense, it flops. It it just it’s it doesn't work. And Jonathan Gotshal, again, I quote him in fluke, and he he has this great quote where he says, you know, we don't know how Harry Potter and Voldemort is going to end, But we know that Voldemort is not gonna die by slipping on a banana peel. Right?
Brian Klaas Like, it's like, it's really obvious this is not gonna be how the book ends. So, you know, there there's this aspect we embed into our culture. I think the I think the thing that I would say is that if you understand this mentality, you're you're better equipped to debunk them. Because you can tell, you know, you can tell someone who's just, you know, who's drawn to the story. Let me tell you, you know, maybe it's a it's a bad story.
Brian Klaas Maybe it's a story that's So I'm inspiring, but at least let me be able to figure out how I can meet you in the narrative, right, and and sort of explain why the narrative doesn't make sense as opposed to just saying you're a crazy person. And I think that's where, you know, you have to show that there's cracks in the story. Like, when we have, entertainment and you have a a film or whatever, People dislike the film when they are like, wait a minute. This doesn't make sense because, like, that bit contradicted that bit. Right?
Brian Klaas Yeah. So I what you have to do is you have to meet the storytelling animal where its mind already is, which is to say humans have to think about these things from from from narratives. And, you know, it's not always gonna work. I think we've got a really uphill battle in in the United States. And it it is I I will say, I mean, have you I've lived in the UK for, 13 years almost, and The level of conspiracies around politics is a it’s it's an American outlier.
Brian Klaas It just it's not something of course, there are people who believe this stuff everywhere else, But the US is so so different on this, especially with the mainstream politicians pumping this stuff. It just doesn't happen here. So it's, you know, it's a really it's it's it's eye opening to see American politics from the outside and see how much of an outlier it is to other rich developed democracy.
Charlie Sykes Okay. So we're an outlier from Britain, but but conspiracy theories have a long history all over the world. I mean, there's no bizarre world. So What is it about America that you see as distinctive?
Brian Klaas I think the the the main thing is the supply. You know, I think so so basically, when you think about this, in the past, right, like every form of technology in terms of media Expanded the number of people who could consume information. So it could be the printing press or the radio, mass media TV, and so on. But it didn't ever expand the number of people who could create information. And what's happened in the modern world is that with the Internet, for the first time ever, It's gone from few to many communication to many to many optimization.
Brian Klaas So a totally random crank can now influence millions of people with a tweet. Right? But But the difference in the US, and this is why the uptake is so much higher, is that the politicians are are engaging in this. And so it it becomes mainstream in a much easier way and the sort of Structures of, oh, wait. You know, it's not a crackpot who's in a tinfoil hat.
Brian Klaas It's a person I voted for, Hussein. Right? Like, it that's the kind of stuff that solidifies the belief and makes it socially acceptable to say these things. Because, like, honestly, I mean, QAnon Belief does exist in the UK. But if you were to say it in the mainstream situation, you would be ostracized from the political world, and you would be ridiculed endlessly on TV.
Brian Klaas Right? So I think that's the issue where, like, additionally, I think some of this is also the media silos. I mean, so in the in the US, for example, You can go on Newsmax or OAN and, like, talk about all these crazy conspiracy theories and, like, you'll never get challenged. Like, you know, 60% of the British public gets their media from the BBC. So this centralization of news, for good or bad, creates a sort of shared reality where conspiracism just doesn't thrive the same way that it does in the United States.
Charlie Sykes Well, I know you we we we started off by talking about how the British media is very, very different. You know, in a in a BBC interview, a politician or a conspiracy theorist would not be able to simply filibuster in the the, the Currency theorists would not be able to simply filibuster, and the the, the interviewer is not going to sit there and just nod their head. They're gonna challenge them and challenge them and challenge them. They're gonna be Amazingly, you know, well well prepared. So you mentioned before the problem of supply, and I was thinking about your analogy of the Of the sand pile and because there are so many grains of sand here.
Charlie Sykes So, you know, obviously, you need to push Back against these by challenging the narrative, but where do you start? Because it feels like they just keep metastasizing And that it's like when you have a 100,000 grains of sand out there, the the task ahead seems really daunting Particularly because we don't have forever. And all of this that you described seems to me, and I think it seems to you too, To be accelerating, this is not this is not a flat line. This is not in decline. This is not something we've got a handle on.
Charlie Sykes This is getting worse Exponentially, and AI is just around the corner.
Brian Klaas Yeah. I mean, I think it's as I say, it's a very thorny problem. 1 of the things that does Feedback to our earlier discussion about the American media and the banality of crazy a little it’s, that the the media is not well equipped to deal with big Picture ideas that persist for a long time but don't create news. So QAnon doesn't really create news. It's not like it's like, oh, a new person believes qanon.
Brian Klaas Here's a story on the 10 o'clock news. Right? It's just this thing that's like, as you say, metastasizing throughout the body Politics. And it's something where, like, You have a really poisonous aspect of, of delusional ideas, but it's not novel. It's just something that's there.
Brian Klaas And so I think, you know, the press has to reimagine some of the ways that it does stories. I think that there you know, I think it would be a service to the United States to have Some debunking that's done on the nightly news where they say, you know, tonight, we're gonna look at this thing where a new you know, can you can make it’s novel. So you say a new poll has come out showing that 50% of Republicans believe at least 1 idea associated with q and a, which by the way, this poll is exists, and it's true. 50% of the Republican party believes at least 1 plank of q and a. So then you say, okay.
Brian Klaas We're gonna devote today's episode of our nightly news broadcast to explaining why it's not true. You know, that's the kind of stuff that starts to move the needle a little bit. I mean, of course, there are people who are not gonna get out of the rabbit hole. That's always the case with conspiracies thinking. It's very difficult to counteract because they say, oh, of course, the media would tell you this.
Brian Klaas Right? They're they're part of the cabal. But, you know, you have to start somewhere, and I think that is The short term solution. The long term solution, you know, I think things like social isolation is really important for this. I mean, I think this is something where, You know, I think American society, especially accelerated through the pandemic, has a lot of people who feel feel very atomized, very separate from other people, And they're highly susceptible to this, especially where Trumpism taps into it perfectly because you're a member of a group.
Brian Klaas Right? Like Right. You put the hat And it’s becomes part of your identity in a way that is totally not true for Bidenism. Right? You know, it's like there's and there's no such thing as Bidenism really anyway.
Brian Klaas And and I think that's you know, the fact that there's no, like, eagles with Biden riding them, like, slapped onto Toyota Priuses tells you that there's Less of a fusion of, like, individual identity with political movements on the on the left in the in the in the United States at the moment. And so, You know, I'm not saying it's it's there's plenty of conspiracy thinking on the left as well. I'm not trying to suggest otherwise, but Yeah. I do think that fusion of identity, with the theory is what's so dangerous on the political right. So part is the long term optimization, part is the sort of debunking needs to get better.
Brian Klaas But there's no silver bullet. It's going to infect our societies for a long time. I mean, I I if I had to explain the number 1 thing that is behind Trump's enduring popularity, I think it's information pipelines, and I think it's the way that people get information about what's going on in the world. And I think that system in the United States is just utterly broken. So that I think helps explain why they accept him so much.
Brian Klaas Right.
Charlie Sykes Well, I mean, that's the problem, of course, is that the systems are broken. So you have the, you know, let's Say 2 2 models here. You have the debunking over here, and you have the really, really interesting conspiracy narrative over here. All of the incentives right now in the media, the clicks, the memberships, the ratings, and everything, I mean, this has been documented. People like the conspiracy theory.
Charlie Sykes Right? You know, that's gonna get 10100 times the eyeballs Then the, you know, ABC News Debunking on the evening news. So okay. So you promised that you were gonna make this uplifting At the end, that that this was uplifting for personal lives. So I might have missed that part, but come on.
Charlie Sykes I I need I need to end on on this because otherwise, it's it’s chaos and it’s gonna happen, and I'm gonna walk out of the house and a branch is gonna fall And it's gonna kill me. So, I mean and and it's not a conspiracy. It's like so what's the uplifting part?
Brian Klaas Yeah. So there's there's sort of 2 sides I would I would point to. 1 is the the subtitle of fluke, the the third part of it is why everything we do matters. And I think 1 of the things that's really cool about chaos theory, and I think this is demonstrable scientific fact Fact, not just some, you know, new age theory or anything. Is that because of the ripple effects of all the things that we do, It is totally wrong to say that we're unimportant.
Brian Klaas And I think 1 of the great Melez, you know, drivers of sort of modern life is this feeling of interchangeability. You know, a robot's gonna come and replace my job or, like, who cares if I go to work today? It won't matter anyway. Like, that feeling is totally not rooted in the way that the world works because, You know, there's all these things that are constantly shifting based on how we behave. And I find that really empowering personally, the idea that, like, we're we're we are reshaping the future, quite literally with what we do.
Brian Klaas And I think that has implications for politics as well. I mean, small small changes and small activism can add up Lots of things.
Charlie Sykes But we have no idea what it is. Right? We have no idea. Yes. We have no idea which narrative.
Charlie Sykes We think we're in 1 movie, but maybe we are a it’s Character in another movie and something we have done will have tremendous impact that we may not know about, we may not understand, and we may never know about. Right?
Brian Klaas So Yes. So you you're right about this. And for people who are interested in the the personal side of my story, there's a a story about a mass murder and the opening of Fluke that is the origin story of my existence. So, yes, I mean, we don't know the ripple effects of, of how these things can play out. But the the the other aspect of this that's slightly less abstract is I think that when you accept the narrative that I'm giving you about how chaos theory actually plays a much bigger role in in our lives than you imagine, You should live differently.
Brian Klaas Right? I mean, so 1 of the lessons is, for example, to experiment more, to also blame yourself a little bit less for your failures, because, you know, there's a little bit less control that you have. I have this, you know, saying if we control nothing, but we influence everything. And and I think this aspect of sort of letting go a little bit is It's, like, really useful. I I found this personally very useful to think I mean, I I I believe I'm a cosmic accident.
Brian Klaas I believe that about humanity. I think there's lots of things that could have happened and an evolution that would not have led to humans. My life being derived from this tragic mass murder in 1905 that I write about in the book, I feel like an accident, and I'm okay with that because when you feel like an accident, you sort of just enjoy life a bit more. You know? There's not a cosmic purpose to my existence, so, I can I can feel like what I'm doing is, you know, affecting the future and sort of just doing things that I enjoy, Trying to make the world a little bit better for other people and, you know, spending time with people who are interesting and nice and, you know, you know, you derive pleasure from and so on?
Brian Klaas And I think that's the kind of thing where, like, the flip side of this, this top down control mentality tells you if you don't have the exact life that you think you should have, You are a failure, and you should be sad about it. And so to me, the world view of of some of these stuff that I'm talking about that is tied to systemic risk in society is also, To me is a way of unlocking some of those sort of different patterns of thinking that I personally find actually much more uplifting than the alternative.
Charlie Sykes See, conversations like this are interesting because I agree with you completely, but I think you and I come up with this from completely opposite ends of the sort of the of the spectrum because I don't think it's all random. I think a lot of it is providential, but I'm also really struck by the fact that we don't know What that providence it’s. So for example, it's possible that this podcast that we are recording right now will be seen by somebody who will think it's vaguely interesting, but will forward it to somebody else who will listen to it, take something from it, and then I don't have any idea what. I don't I don't know what happens. It's something that we say, something that we write, something that sticks in somebody's mind in a way and it may play out in a way that we have no idea.
Charlie Sykes It may be that, you know, this real significance won't take place for a decade and a half. Maybe somebody's gonna, you know, go through the archives and everything. Now you could say that that's completely chance and everything. I could say it's the hidden hand of providence. But in some ways, you you you you're still in it it's the same existential choice to Act like what you do might make a difference.
Charlie Sykes Right?
Brian Klaas Yeah. No. I mean, I I love that you said that because I think this is the stuff where, you know, I I have my own set of views. I mean, I personally, I don't believe in God, for example. So Mhmm.
Brian Klaas That aspect of that, you know, does create a different viewpoint. Yeah. But you're completely right that you end up having the same philosophical implications if you think that there is sort of a larger plan to things that you have less control over. You end up at the same point. Right?
Brian Klaas So if providence is it’s is sort of diverting your trajectories through life rather than randomness or evolutionary pathways, whatever, like, you still have to give up a little bit of control. And I think 1 of the things that I've acknowledged, you know, when when I I grew up in Minnesota, I spent my whole childhood and and early adult life there and so on. And, you know, The modern world in the United States is, is a world, I think, that is obsessed with control. It's like Yeah. You know, life hacks, Optimization, checklists, it's how we navigate the world.
Brian Klaas And I think there's some of this stuff where, like, I've realized it's part of how I live my life a little differently from writing Fluke is that Just, like, do a little bit less of that, and actually you end up a lot happier. And that's for me, it worked. If it works for someone in the audience, I'd be delighted. But I think it's something where, you know, you you you just There's a lot of people who don't understand the origin of why these things are happening. I think it's randomness.
Brian Klaas I think there's a lot of chaos involved. I've talked to people who are, you know, Really hardcore believers, and they have a totally different viewpoint, but they actually sort of accept the philosophy a bit more. And, You know, everybody makes their own sense of the world, which is 1 of the beautiful things about humanity. YouTube got 8,000,000,000 people dealing with the most complex system in the universe.
Charlie Sykes Trying to
Brian Klaas And everybody has their own answer to these questions, and that's what, you know, Fluke is trying to challenge people to think about them a little bit a little bit differently.
Charlie Sykes Well, I think in the Venn diagram where we agree is that, That, you know, you don't believe in God. I do believe in God, but I really have the humility to say I have no idea what God's thinking. I have no idea what his intention is. He does not talk to me all the time. In fact, no.
Charlie Sykes I may think that the story of my life is x, y, and z. It may turn out to be something Completely different. It may be you know, I may be the butterfly that's will influence somebody in or or not. Who knows? I just have no idea.
Charlie Sykes So it's funny because My cousin, who is a very bright and interesting guy, very, very active in politics, said that his goal for for 2024 was to care less and do more. And, you know, I've been thinking about that, and I think what he meant was don't be so obsessed about control. Do not let it overwhelm you. Do what you can do, but also sort of understand, you know, be at peace with sort of the limitations of of it all. And And I think that that's that's that's 1 of the the takeaways that I think people might have when they begin thinking about it this way.
Charlie Sykes But this is a very, very, This is an immensely, thought provoking book, and I really appreciate you joining me, Brian. The book is Fluke, Chance, Chaos, And why everything we do matters. Brian Klaas), thank you so much for coming back on the podcast, Brian.
Brian Klaas Thanks for having me on. It was a it was a great conversation.
Charlie Sykes And thank you all for listening to The Bullwork Podcast. I'm Charlie Sykes. We'll be back tomorrow, and we'll do this all over again.